Related papers: Ants are not Conscious
What is it about human brains that allows us to reason symbolically whereas most other animals cannot? There is evidence that dynamic binding, the ability to combine neurons into groups on the fly, is necessary for symbolic thought, but…
The aim of this study is to formally express awareness for modeling practical agent communication. The notion of awareness has been proposed as a set of propositions for each agent, to which he/she pays attention, and has contributed to…
Did natural consciousness and intelligent systems arise out of a path that was co-evolutionary to evolution? Can we explain human self-consciousness as having risen out of such an evolutionary path? If so how could it have been? In this…
Cognition is the process of knowing. As carried out by a dynamical system, it is the process by which the system absorbs information into its state. A complex network of agents cognizes knowledge about its environment, internal dynamics and…
Consciousness is notoriously hard to define with objective terms. An objective definition of consciousness is critically needed so that we might accurately understand how consciousness and resultant choice behaviour may arise in biological…
Are some cosmologists trying to return human beings to the centre of the cosmos? In the view of some critics, the so-called "anthropic principle" is a desperate attempt to salvage a scrap of dignity for our species after a few centuries of…
Reasoning does not work well when done in isolation from its significance, both to the needs and interests of an agent and with respect to the wider world. Moreover, those issues may best be handled with a new sort of data structure that…
Using elementary distributed computing techniques we suggest an explanation for two unexplained phenomena in regards to ant colonies, (a) a substantial amount of ants in an ant colony are idle, and (b) the observed low survivability of new…
How did the human species evolve the capacity not just to communicate complex ideas to one another but to hold such conversations from across the globe, using remote devices constructed from substances that do not exist in the natural…
A number of concepts are included in the term 'consciousness'. We choose to concentrate here on phenomenal consciousness, the process through which we are able to experience aspects of our environment or of our physical state. We probably…
I offer an analysis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its relevancy for the scientific endeavour. I submit that the world is not, and cannot be, rational - only some brained beings are. The Principle of Sufficient Reason is not a…
Our research is focused on making a human-like question answering system which can answer rationally. The distinguishing characteristic of our approach is that it will use automated common sense reasoning to truly "understand" dialogues,…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
The theoretical base for consciousness, in particular an explanation of how consciousness is defined by the brain, has long been sought by science. We propose a partial theory of consciousness as relations defined by typical data. The…
Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…
Machine common sense remains a broad, potentially unbounded problem in artificial intelligence (AI). There is a wide range of strategies that can be employed to make progress on this challenge. This article deals with the aspects of…
The most enigmatic aspect of consciousness is the fact that it is felt, as a subjective sensation. The theory proposed here aims to explain this particular aspect. The theory encompasses both the computation that is presumably involved and…
The currently dominating artificial intelligence and machine learning technology, neural networks, builds on inductive statistical learning. Neural networks of today are information processing systems void of understanding and reasoning…
Populations of agents often exhibit surprising collective behavior emerging from simple local interactions. The common belief is that the agents must posses a certain level of cognitive abilities for such an emerging collective behavior to…
Colonies of ants are systems of interacting living organisms in which interactions between individuals and their environment can produce a reliable performance of a complex tasks without the need for centralised control. Particularly…